This Doctor Shows You How You Can Control Your Biological Age | Dr. Caroline Leaf on Health Theory

When you manage your mind, you can change your cellular health, your biological age, in other words. Um, and so you control that. So you literally with your mind control how your DNA functions. Everybody, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is best-selling author Dr. Caroline Leaf. She's a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD in communication pathology who's been researching the brain, mental health, and memory formation for over 30 years. Her insights and methodology have helped over a million people to improve the quality of their lives and have made her a highly sought-after speaker who lectures to audiences around the world. Additionally, she runs the Integrated Mind Network and is participating in a DC-based mental health initiative that is a part of her tireless efforts to reduce the global stigma around mental health. Dr. Leaf, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, I'm thrilled. Thank you. Yeah, of course. So, um, I'm super curious to know if if your, um, your Skype can be believed, you are now in Dallas, Texas. Um, how how does one go from South Africa? And I think were you you were born somewhere else even from there? Yes, yeah, I got an interesting history. I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa and we've been in the States now for 12 years. So we're based in Dallas, but we travel globally 70% of the month pre-COVID. Post-COVID and during COVID, we obviously haven't traveled, but yeah, our main office that we're based in Dallas. So I'm my mom was English, my dad he was Irish English, my dad Italian. So I'm kind of a mixture and my husband's Swiss, so put that all together and it's a it's an interesting mix. So, I start with that is because one of the things I find most interesting about your work is the whole idea of identity and how important that is for people. And I know you work with people a lot on that. And one of the things that I have found certainly anchored my own identity and I've seen anchor a lot of people's identity is where they're from. And so having that sort of high level of being a nomad and and going to all these places, one, how has that impacted your identity? How do you think about identity? And, you know, what are what's your guidance for people trying to solidify a useful identity? Tom, that's an excellent question and it's really a good place to start because when I worked in clinical practice, which I did for 25 years, it's the first area that you need to work with with people because your identity is your value. So, if your identity, if you know how to manage your identity, you can be absolutely anywhere and that doesn't throw you. You know, you don't attach your identity to a place, you attach it to yourself, which is a healthy way of doing it. And I think probably the work um it's good you I'm glad you asked me about South Africa, too, because my initial research was obviously done there and I would spend 3 days up to 3 days a week working in the apartheid era because I mean, I'm this is back in the '80s, in the transition with Mandela coming in and then post-apartheid. And, you know, with this everything that's going on currently at the moment with racism, I saw firsthand what was happening to people's identity and a lot of my initial brain research was done and that's where I honestly learned most of what I do because it's I was in the trenches dealing with people whose identity had been removed. A classic example of identity is Nelson Mandela and when he was when he was sent to prison in on Robben Island, one of the things that they did was they the first thing besides, you know, all the inhumane things they did was that they took their ID card away. And your ID card already in an apartheid South Africa, um to that ID card meant everything. And the first thing they would do say take it away and say you you have no value. You you you have no identity. And then they would put them in, you know, the prison outfits and they would there was no recognition of identity and that's how they would broke a lot of their spirits. And it's interesting how Mandela took that and turned that into what we know transformed that experience into something very constructive. Whereas there was a that the traditional I mean the the well-known hammer murderer who was um incarcerated at the same time as him. And what they would have to do all day long would hit hit these white stones with a hammer. And it was there was not no recognition, no value for them as a human. And they would just do this day in and day out. Dehumanizing. And when when Mandela got out of prison, we know what he did. He transformed the world, impacted the world. The hammer murderer went on to be the hammer murderer. He actually murdered people and became a serial killer. And these two classic examples of people's whose identities were removed and who used that in a different way and transformed that in a different way. So, if I had to define identity, it's really simple. It's how you uniquely think and feel and choose. That's what it is. So, when I think of identity, I actually think of it a little bit differently. And I'd be curious to know if we have conflicting ideas on identity if we're just saying the same thing maybe in different angles. So, I think of identity as a statement that you repeat to yourself about who you are using actual like those words. So, in the beginning I the thing I repeated to myself is I am Salieri. And I don't know if you know the movie Amadeus or not, but Salieri was the character who was just good enough at music to recognize he would never be as good as Mozart. And when I saw that movie, I was like, "Oh my god, that's me." Like I'm just smart enough to realize how much smarter other people are. And so I had that similar lament ment of like, "Could you not have made me dumber so that I don't have the self-awareness, that I don't recognize that I'm not as good as these people?" Or couldn't you have made me as good as these people? Right? But being in the area where it's like, "Oh man, I just recognize where I'm at." So, I had to switch that. And And so a big moment for me was going, "Actually, I am the learner." And because I could repeat it to myself and I could define what a learner was and what a learner does and it became so concrete and so specific that it gave me um a way to see myself that made me feel good and a way to behave that moved me forward. Um is that is that a collision with how you see it? Is that No, it's totally totally complimentary. So, what you've done is you've translated you how you thought, felt, and chose about yourself from being someone who almost was that that the almost there the solar solar area solar area to recognizing that actually you are. So, you basically thought, felt, and chose in order for you to make a statement. It's preceded by um a thought. So, you had this thought of who you were and then you had to change it to another thought and a thought is a big concept and it's a real thing. But, thoughts come from an action and that is the unique identity of um thinking, feeling, and choosing. So, you had to think, feel, choose, you built a thought, and then that thought became encapsulated into a statement. Can Can you tell me what do you mean by choose? Okay. So, um as you um what we do at incredible speeds on the non-conscious level at like 400 billion actions per second, we do on a conscious level at a much slower rate. And um we have awareness of our thinking, feeling, and choosing every 10 seconds. So, as I think, I will feel and as I think and feel, I will choose. Choice means that you're building updating your knowledge. It's like a wave of of knowledge that's been constantly updated about yourself. mean I'm choosing what to believe about myself? Choosing yes, choice about everything. It's choice about everything. Every experience I get right at the moment as you're listening to me, I'm giving you information, you're thinking, feeling, and making choices about what I'm saying. So, the three go together and choice is kind of the it's like it puts the bow on it. It kind of collapses the wave. If you think of a wave on a beach, it's the easiest way to understand choice. You think and feel the wave builds and then as you choose the wave crashes. So, you make a decision and then that leads you to the next bit of information that you me push on that a little bit. So, you've got you're saying things, let's say it's about identity, and so I'm I'm having a reaction to that or I'm thinking about it. I'm having an emotional reaction to that, and then I'm going to make a decision about whether I think it's true or it's false or worthy of pursuit or whatever. Um and that sort of narrows the world of opportunity down into Now that I have a decision about it, I've sort of cataloged it. Is that And then the world becomes I've cataloged all these things in all these different places, and that creates my what I call frame of reference. I don't know um what word you would use for that, but Yeah, you can you can explain it exactly like that, and it's not just a one-off thing. It's a constant process. So, there's there's a lot of little decisions, like a comic strip. If you think of a comic strip, there's a lot of little cartoons, and then but we don't see the individual cartoons, we see a whole flow. So, every but every little cartoon is like that think-feel-choose, think-feel-choose, but put together it's a flow. So, to get to the point of I am a learner, there were a lot of little individual parts of the cartoon, little individual think-feel-choose boxes that led up to the I the the identity that you created, that you shifted for yourself, that you literally reconceptualized. So, you So, thinking and feeling and choosing is mind in action, and we're always in action 24/7, and there's a there's there's a bunch of little proteins that are supercomputers that are vibrating with I am a learner in the in in little branches, looks like a tree, and every experience that you have daily is being added to that concept because you keep on learning. And that's a thought. A thought is like a tree filled with memories. And it's a thought is a huge concept, and it's something that we build from thinking, feeling, and choosing, but within it is an infinite number of branches that you keep growing because of each experience. So, the I am a learner keeps growing, so the identity keeps growing and and changing and along the way it's very organic. So, along the way we experience this, we have a relationship, we meet someone else, we learn something new. So, every time you do an interview, every time you prepare for an interview, every time you have a conversation with your wife or friend, you are adding to that identity because you approach things in terms of I'm learning. I'm learning new stuff all the time. Um a lot of that a lot of people when that would come into my practice a lot of people that that contact me now the thousands will say I don't know who I am. I don't know what my purpose is. I've been told by everyone I can't do this. I can't do that. I've gone through this. I've gone through this trauma, this brain injury, this autism. Or in the racial South Africa that I worked in in this current racist environment, the value of well, you're black, so you're not worth the same thing. Who Who are you really? So, we've all got the same brain structures and physiology, but the way that you are building this information and the way that your viewers are building what I'm saying now is going to look different. We're all building different trees of what I'm saying at the moment based on your unique identity. So, when we accept that let's um I want to slow down there just because I want to make sure that people can actually piece this together. So, I'm going to translate some of this into just the words that I use and let me know if I'm actually understanding this. Absolutely. So, um there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, right? The sort of immortal Shakespeare quote, which I think is really brilliant and and points to how humans are meaning making machines. So, what I hear you saying is that in every moment your your thoughts ultimately come down to a choice that you're making. And I like the word choice if I'm understanding correctly, I like the word choice. So, I had always taken oh, I'm not as good as other people and that's just who I am, but once I realized oh, that's a choice and I could actually focus my um I could make a different choice, which is that well, my brain is plastic and I can learn. So, I'm not as good as them yet. And so, the insertion of the word yet became this incredibly powerful, life-changing decision that I and I've heard you talk about this in the early days of brain plasticity it was hotly contested. People are debating it. Is it real? Is it not real? And it was you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Whatever number of neurons you're born with, that's what you're going to die with. That's it. The brain doesn't make new cells. And so in the the late 90s when I'm sort of sliding towards depression and I'm like, man, I'm I've taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt from college. I'm not talented. I'm never going to be able to do what I want to do for a living and and now I'm lost. And so it was a really dark place, but I find brain plasticity. It's hotly debated, but I choose to believe that it's real. So when you talk about the the tree and sort of the way I think about all the branches is that what you're talking about? Where these those little incremental things you're constantly changing the shape of this tree as you make these different choices about all these little incremental concepts that you encounter that you then assign meaning to. Perfect. You said that perfectly. That's exactly what you're doing. When you think you will automatically always feel and when you feel you will automatically choose. We do that as humans whether we like it or not. So we either choosing, we can't never not choose. You know, that's one of the arguments that people say, well, I'm I'm not going to do anything. That's a choice. So you're either you're choosing either to actually move in one direction or the other all the time. So the three always go together. You cannot separate them out. So the result that you build is that tree, the thoughts. They look like trees in the in the brain. We see that they have an arbor-like structure which is tree-like structure. They're constantly changing. They're never the same. They're always updating from every experience that you have. You're always growing little branches. There's no space limits to the amount of branches that you grow. There's no space limit in your brain just by the nature of how the brain actually grows itself. Um and this this is neurogenesis, neuroplasticity which is the research happening for all these years. So you a thought then as you think, feel, and choose and we're talking specifically about the thought of identity at the moment, which is very core cuz it pervades how we view everything in life. It's a very dominant thought structure that we build into our brain, and it kind of is the sunglasses we put on on how we view life. That thought, when you think, feel, and choose, and you build the tree, and if my hand is the tree, we can literally imagine that the inside this tree we've got information, so on the branches, and emotions because we think about information, so we build information. And also the emotions, which is the feeling we experience at that moment, also goes into there. So, this thought has information and emotions, and all the little branches are the memories of the thought, which keep getting added to. So, thoughts are real things. They occupy mental real estate. Let's talk about how nothing can change, energy is never lost. We know that from Newton. So, the energy is never lost, energy is transferred. And let's say that you're you see yourself in a very negative way, like those people that I work with in South Africa, or my patients, or the example you gave of yourself. If we constantly think about ourselves negatively, we're going against the natural function of our the way that the energy should flow in the brain as we are going through life. So, instead of the When I think about should though, I that I'll that I'll derail on, so I won't I won't take us down that path, but to me whether we should or shouldn't is certainly we can change the way that we feel, we can change even the hard wiring of our brain by getting a grip of our thoughts. And I know one thing you've talked a lot about is teach, yeah. So, walk me through like when it comes to changing your identity. So, you've got this tree, you've made all these decisions, you've got these emotions associated with thoughts, and they sort of in my language will cough up to your conscious mind at the weirdest of times and cause you to interpret situations in in an unhelpful way unless you take control of that. And and I love your analogy of it being like a tree because once you get into an organic growth I start thinking some people the way that their frame of reference to all those little choices that they've made have built instead of, you know, like a beautiful bonsai tree it's a bramble and it's, you know, it's tangled and there's thorns and it's like impossible to get your way through. So, how do you help people whether it's meditation, journaling, breathing exercises, developing self-awareness, like how do you help them take control of that process and begin to build an identity that serves them? Okay, brilliant question. So, if you use your mind in a very determined way, so if you control your choices and you you've said this you've said this both of us that when you think and feel and choose you have the ability to change your choices to control your choices. So, that thinking and feeling is leading to the change of the choice. When you do that you change the structure of your brain because the thinking, feeling, choosing move through your brain leads to genetic change in your brain which then builds the little proteins that actually hold the thought which are the and the proteins make the branches of the tree. So, this is when you talk about neuroplasticity the visual you can actually imagine is of tree branches growing. So, there is structural change so you are changing matter with mind. So, what is mind? Think, feel, choose. What is matter? It's the physical substance or substrate of the brain and the body and then the brain controls the body. So, how do you teach people to be conscious about that process? Like for me I always tell people nice and simple the only identity that's going to serve you long term is that of the learner. Period, simple as it's the most foundational. I I am very open. If somebody has a better answer, I will immediately adopt it, but it's anti-fragile to use Nassim Taleb's term where the more you attack somebody with a the mindset of the learner, the stronger you make them because their their identity is not associated with being right, with being good or worthy or anything that's fragile, being smart. It's all around, cool, I I want to know where I'm wrong because I want to improve. My very self-esteem is attached to my willingness to learn, to stare nakedly at my inadequacies and get better. So, that's sort of my foundational thing that I hand to people and say, "Look, just do that. If you build your identity around that, you're going to be golden." I give them the phrases to repeat. Um what's the the scaffolding or process is probably a better way to say it. What's the process that you give people for changing their identity in a very specific way? Okay. So, first of all, learner is an excellent way because learner means that you're always open to change. So, you're always open to thinking, feeling, and making choices. So, learner is an excellent an excellent word to use for that because you can't learn unless you think and feel and and make choices. I quickly want to just frame it with related to something that you mentioned a moment ago cuz it'll make it easy to understand the how our brain should flow. You the word should you you paused on the word should. Everyone's got their own should. I want to stress that. There is no um normal brain. Yale actually brought a study out in 2018 and I and I stress it. I all my research all my neuroscience research is done looking at people as individual case studies. So, you are your own measure and the whole mental health movement completely is counter to that because the I'd say the vast majority of the biomedical model because it doesn't look at the the individual as an individual in the context of their story and measure against themselves and look at what they've gone through and what they're going through and the societal etc. etc. It's more these are the symptoms, diagnose the symptoms, give you a label, and lock you into a box. And that has been very detrimental to mental health. We've gone backwards in mental health for the last 60 years. It hasn't worked. It's made things worse. What we have to get back to is the recognition of the individual. So, when I say should, it's not should against any measure. It is there's a certain pattern in the brain that we see when uh when we've got a handle on how we comfortable. And being comfortable is also being uncomfortable. So, I have Maybe you feel depressed like you express express that you went through depression. So, if you're feeling depressed or anxious, these are not illnesses. These are not limiting illnesses. These are signals that there's something going on in your life that you need to look at. So, depression related to identity, I can't achieve what I'm what I don't believe I'm ever going to make it. I'm I'm just not good enough for whatever. All that thought of I'm not good enough had all the little memories of whatever from whatever experience inside of that. So, that's frames it. So, how do we fix that? So, what I studied was the science of thought. So, if we think, feel, and choose to build a thought, how does that process happen in the brain? And how can I translate that back for a patient who's suffering from depression or child who's battling with learning issues or someone who has an identity crisis or whatever. So, there's five basic things that your brain goes through, but there's a preparation phase first. The preparation is the mindfulness, the breathing, all those things which then prepares the body on a physiological level and a neurophysiological level for the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system to balance and for us to get mindful in the moment. As soon as you are have done mindfulness training, for example, and some mindfulness work or bit of meditation and breathing, you then your brain is then in a phase phase state where the different energies of the brain alpha, beta, theta, data, delta, nothing weird um are all flowing like in a beach. Think of a sea. Think of the sea. If you go out far out in the sea, you've got the huge swell. Um and that's like it's deep and it's big and it's massive. But, it's a massive swell. That's delta. Then you come in a little closer and it's a big swell, but it's not as big. That's theta. And those two represent the deep the the nonconscious mind, which is the biggest part of us, that nonphysical part of us, where our intelligence is, our memories. It's working 24/7. It's huge. It's churning. This is why the sea analogy is really good. Then you've got you come in a little closer to the shore and you get alpha which is now starting to build into more of a wave that you can recognize the typical wave form. And then you get high beta which is kind of the top of the wave where you're starting to see the white crest. And then you get the beta where it crashes onto the beach and then you get the little ripple which is what we would call gamma. So this the gamma beta gamma beta are all dealing with conscious very they're active 20 All of them are active all the time but they become more active when you're conscious and awake. And when you are sleeping the others become more conscious but they've got to work together cuz it's the conscious and the non-conscious mind. And the alpha is a state that your brain goes into where you can actually capture and get access to the non-conscious mind by being aware of the conscious mind. Okay, so how do you do it? So the first how do we get this wave flowing that sometimes will be a big wave and sometimes small just depending on circumstances. You have a trauma, you have a this, you have a that. It's all normal. Okay, it's all part of life. It's all we go up and down anxiety. These are all things that we experience. We have to normalize depression anxiety. And yes, you have extreme states from extreme circumstances and we can talk about that in a in a moment. But life is is a wave but it's not a perfect wave all the time. But what we don't want is to to become a tsunami or a white river rapid. You know, where it's like overwhelming and you and you feel like even if it does, you can still control through your choices. So we have this phenomenal ability as humans of awareness. But and it's a skill that we need to learn. So what I'm talking about now in the five steps that I'm going to now summarize for you and if summarize is all my if I have to give you one word for all the work that I've done, it's mind management. I teach mind management based and I and I show the evidence of mind management which is basically neuroplasticity happening through showing people that when you do certain mind actions, you're going to change your physiology, your blood, etc. Even your cells. I've even shown that your telomeres will grow or shorten depending on how you manage your mind, which is incredibly important for biological aging, cellular health, etc. And then also the changes inside of your brain. So, the first thing that we as humans are very good at, but we can get very bad at if we get very distracted, is awareness and self-regulation. So, step number one is developing awareness or skill of awareness. This is something we have to develop and it's something that needs to be grown and it's something that you need to teach our kids in schools. Can you give like a super quick example of how people can improve their awareness? Okay, so it's being a It's It's actually using what I call the multiple perspective advantage. So, it's standing back and observing your own thinking, feeling, and choosing. You can do it with me right now. So, as we're talking, all the listeners and viewers can do this right now. Be very aware like I'm very aware now of my fingers moving. I'm aware of your facial expression. I'm aware of what's behind you. I'm aware of my own body movements. I'm aware of our conversation and the relationship developing, how you feel I'm sorry I'm aware and I'm watching my thinking, I'm feeling, and choosing in terms of my choice of words. So, I'm highly aware. Which is a state that you will come out of when you're in mindfulness. When you do my meditation, you get into a very aware state of your of your um what you are feeling physically, how maybe your toes sore, maybe your your heart beating faster, whatever. I'm just giving my random examples. So, it's being very tuned in to what's going on in terms of your thinking and your physical and the emotional. So, what information am I thinking about? What emotions am I experiencing? What physical sensations? And it's developing that. With our very With our modern era, we've become very distracted. Uh they did a very interesting study at Harvard and a couple of other universities teamed up with them where they put people into a room and they took away all their iPhones, any kind of technology. They just had to sit. The instruction was just to think. They had 18 to 75 year olds and they just had to think. And they only had to do it for 16 minutes and the majority absolutely hated it. They couldn't do it. They were They were frustrated. They were irritated. There was a shocking device in the room. It was very well hidden and some of them were so bored that they found a shocking device and they shocked themselves. They'd rather shock themselves than sit and think. Just 10 years ago this kind the same kind of research was done and people loved it. People have in our modern era and I'm not anti-technology. It's brilliant. But it's mind management of technology. When we lose our awareness skill, when we aren't aware of having um aware of you and how you feeling, I lose a natural part of me which is empathy. Awareness is very much related to empathy. Empathy for myself, my identity, who I am, empathy for others, empathy for my impact that I'm making on having on others. Um awareness of I'm getting irritated. Why am I getting irritated? Not just reacting and being irritated. So we see in our current modern era and we can't just blame our modern era, but it's playing into it. It's making it more difficult. When we are so busy with um technology and things be so accessible and the lifestyle that it's now everything's just on your and you can just get everything so quickly, um we we haven't taken enough time to think and your brain needs to reboot. So part of awareness is awareness of what am I thinking at the moment? Why did I just snap at my spouse? Why did I feel irritated with that? Why did I Why am I feeling what I'm feeling? of awareness is that the rebooting that you're talking about or is meditating and shifting from say beta to alpha, is that the rebooting? It's all process. So once again, it's a process. So it's it's a determined choice, once again, to stand back and observe your own thinking. So, you use your choice to observe your choice. So, you're going into And when people do this, we see massive activity in the frontal lobe, showing that there's a lot of insight happening. So, you're watching yourself, almost like that Scrooge movie where he goes and watches himself growing up as a child. Well, you actually You know that movie is a very good analogy of what I'm talking about. That is something we need to develop. It's there in us, but it's something that we have to grow. So, awareness is related to that concept. It's also developed through think-a-moments, daydreaming, mind wandering. But in a in a sense where you don't let your mind go off on a tangent, but you have a fixed amount of time where you let your mind You just do that in the room. Just think. Just let your mind think. And to be very aware of your thinking, and to notice the intrusive thoughts, to I mean, 95% of 95 to 99% of people have got intrusive thoughts. And I don't know why they say that in the research. It should be 100% because we all have intrusive thoughts. But what they're trying to say is that about 94% of people suffer from intrusive thoughts that are actually debilitating. And then what we tend to do is um don't We don't focus on them. We shove them down. But if you shove something down, it goes back even stronger than it was before. So, if you don't deal with something, then it will it creates a very damaged energy pattern in the brain. So, the energy now Now, you're going to get too much delta activity and theta activity, and that means that when you go to sleep at night, you won't go into the the non-REM sleep, which is your deep sleep, for example. And that you have to get enough of that sleep in order to release growth hormone factors, in order to release telomerase for cells. A million different things go on. So, if we go to If we don't manage our minds, I'm just giving a couple of examples, and awareness is the first step, and awareness is is that all five steps are about the management, right? All of them. And and and even the preparation reel us So, um number one, we've got awareness. And then number two, Number two is reflection. So, but before awareness comes preparation. So, never forget we prepare. We've set our brain and body with the meditation being etc. Awareness then is this whole becoming aware of what you're thinking, feeling, and choosing. Quick example before I go into reflection. Let's say that we take Let's take your example. So, now you became aware of that you were actually seeing yourself as someone who almost was good enough, but not good enough kind of thing. That was this thought concept and then you had all these examples and you even gave it a label. So, that's the first thing if it if it use just identity as example. This These five steps can be applied to anything you're going through. Whether it is a toxic habit, a toxic trauma, an identity issue like we're talking about now, um just the day-to-day managing life, you can use these five steps because it's mind management. It's how you control your thinking, feeling, and choosing to make sure your brain stays obeys you. Stays online so that you can manage the next moment and not react um that you can be proactive in your reactions and not not reactive because the reactive will cause brain damage and you can fix it, but then it's more work. So, we can always fix a trauma. We can always fix a bad decision. So, you know, we don't have to beat yourself up about that, but we can also learn to be more proactive. So, the first step is the awareness. Second step is reflection. Reflection is "Why did I even think that in the first place? What were the root causes of the reason that you felt like that about yourself?" And I've heard your story before and there's a lot of stuff that you went through as a child that that you could track that back to. And then you ask yourself why you thought that, which is the reflect step, it wouldn't come out straight away. It's going to take you at least 63 days. It's going to take you at least nine weeks minimum. It could take you days? So, okay, so neuroplasticity it happens in in various different cycles. The overarching cycle is that it takes 21 days to build a long-term memory to get what we call a gamma peak, which is the evidence that we learning has actually taken place. I'm coming to your word of learning cuz I love the word learning. Learning is what I use for years, so that's why I love that you use that word. So, Twitter takes 21 days to learn to build a long-term memory. Now, long-term memory means I've built a tree with information and emotions, and it's there. It's in my brain, and um I can use it. But, if I don't stabilize it, it's like a little plant. If I don't water it, won't grow. So, it's built, but it's not accessible. So, within 48 hours, or even shorter, or maybe within a few days, I'm I know I learned that stuff, but I can't access it. So, I have to get it to a deeper level of accessibility. I have to make it um accessible memory. I have to automatize it. And the simple word for that is I've got to turn it into a habit. And that takes at least another two cycles of 21 days to turn a new thought tree into an accessible memory that it becomes a behavioral change. So, you wouldn't have done the I'm a learner in overnight. No one can do can transform their identity overnight. It's the cartoon stuff. It's going to be a little bit every day. So, therefore, we see certain time points with neuroplasticity where we see a change happening. Day four, day seven, day 14, day 21, day 42, day 63. Very clear what we would see gamma peaks in the brain showing that neuroplasticity is happening, that changes are happening. Very exciting, because it's evidence that even if you don't consciously feel like you're changing, we have the evidence that on your non-conscious level, which is always 10 steps ahead of your conscious level. In the fact, it literally is 10 seconds before you conscious of anything, your non-conscious is already sending you messages to send through your subconscious, through the via warning signals of, you know, you feel agitated or you feel your heartbeat, some sort of physical, some sort of sensation. examples of that is people with the they have brain damage that stops them from forming long-term memories. So, a doctor will go in, put a pin in their hand, shake hands with this person. Person jumps back. Why'd you poke me? Oh, yeah, sorry about that. They come back in sometimes like 3 minutes later very briefly, and they go to shake their hand, and the person will refuse. But, they can't form long-term memories, so they'll ask them, "Oh, why don't you shake my hand?" And they'll give you a BS answer. "Oh, people that wear lab coats and make me nervous. I don't I don't like to shake hands with people because of germs, whatever." But, the reality is they are not shaking your hand because subconsciously somewhere they have actually tracked that you had that pin in your hand, and so there was a a sort of emotional memory formation that doesn't reach the conscious part, so you don't have a logical explanation, but the brain is so desperate to have a story that's cohesive and makes sense that people will cough up these like super random and not at all true reasons for why they don't shake hands. That That is always blown me away. All right, so That That actually So, that that person was going to that shop. They literally have um an experience. They thought, felt, chose, felt, they went to their little cartoon strips, think, feel, choose, think, feel, choose 40 times a second, conscious, whatever, the whole process, 400 billion actions per second on the non-conscious, and they built a tree. So, it was all on the non-conscious level, cuz that's where the work is. That's where, you know, you're consciously experiencing, but you push it into your non-conscious, so you have your instantaneous memory where you build a temporary short-term memory, and that you bring them back in the room, and that's what they're operating from. Bring them in 3 weeks later, or even 72 hours later, there's a good chance, unless you've reinforced it sufficient times, you wouldn't have The memory would denature. The protein tree converts to heat energy. But, if you sustain it, what we see through learn to learn, you have to do repeated little bits every single day, and then you get it to the point of the 21 days, and thereafter you keep on moving. So, when I worked in cycle at schools, I would arrange the the arrange the the education cycles in cycles of three, so that you would do your testing at 3 weeks, 6 weeks, 9 weeks, so that you keep building and building and building layer upon layer upon layer a little bit every day. If you're doing trauma work, like you're working through some really major toxic trauma, um even identity, which can be very traumatic, um is you do very limited time in the day. So, if it's if it's brain building, like school work or learning something, there's no limit to how much time you spend. The more you spend, the better it builds resilience in your brain, incredible for mental health. But, when you're trying to deal with a toxic thing, like a toxic mindset, like I'm not good enough, I can't I'm just never going to reach that level, that you have to shift, that you keep to around 37 between 7 and 30 minutes a day. Why? Because of the emotional load. And people can get so overwhelmed emotionally that you get all these chemical reactions that keep happening over and over and over, and you're not giving yourself that thinker break to be able to capture that thought, and then it becomes a a thought that like an OCD thought or repetitive thought, intrusive, that you don't control. So, mind management is not to allow that to happen. Mind management is to do very concentrated work on the trauma, whatever it is, the identity, for 7 to 30 minutes, and then you don't work on it the rest of the day. You just have prompts for the rest of the day. So, let me let me transfer this data back into the finish the five steps, and then we can circle back to this exact example. So, we've aware, aware that you've got that mindset. You start reflecting on it. And so, in day one of 63 days, you would have day one you discovered this one little branch on the tree, and the next day another five little branches, and then that remind you of these little So, each day it builds a little bit, little bit. We've heard so much about how habits build. This is the science behind habit formation that I'm describing. You're actually growing the actual little branches, and you're making connections across different parts Oh, that happened there, that happened there. That's why you're building it into this network in your brain. You're building this big oak tree that then has all these like the roots. You know, the root system of trees tends to go Think of the ancient friend, the the the the huge um What are those trees called? Those massive trees. Their root systems are Redwoods. The redwoods, thank you. The their root systems are very much like our brain. Um they just they grow across they cross into each other and that's what happens as you reflect. So, in your reflect stage, you are drawing on all the experiences and building it into a new cohesive tree. Then, it's important that you also that you then write. So, the third step is we genetically write. As we choose the way of crashes, we switch on and off genes. And when that happens, proteins are made and those are the proteins that are the little computers that hold the thoughts. That's why I say thoughts are real. Thoughts aren't these It's a real weirdo things. Thoughts are real physical things that occupy mental real estate like a house occupies physical real estate in land. And you build them. You control them. You change them. You can add to them. You can do They're always able to be updated. Um, they Every experience updates them. So, your tree by now, cuz this is quite a few years back, is pretty big because you've now constantly learned and you've shown yourself you now have your identity is very clear. So, across your brain, your sunglasses are now of your identity are of one of I am a learner. And you prove it to yourself every single day and confirm that message to yourself every single single day and it pervades everything. So, you've now like a good virus. Um, they that spreads across the whole brain. It infects the whole brain. And it affects it through the neurons, through the synapses, through the physical structures, as well as through the energy that flows through the through the alpha, beta, delta, theta, etc., etc. And you kind of work out and then you'll have something will happen. It'll knock your identity. Someone will say something. You question yourself. You'll have a little wobble and that's great. You embrace it. So, there's awareness. Now, I'm aware that there's something. I feel this this person said this. It's made me feel this about my identity. Let me reflect on it. Become aware. Let me reflect. Okay? So, I jumped ahead a little bit there to give you an example of those two steps, but you need to write this down. So, when we write, we all know about journaling and everyone goes on and on about write. It's it's real. Writing does the most phenomenal stuff in the in the brain. You literally put your brain on paper. But one of the best ways of writing is to just when you trying to work through stuff is to just pour your thoughts on a page. It doesn't have to be neat. The more messy, the better. So when you write, you actually allow a release of energy. You allow the parts of the brain that are called the basal ganglia that are like in the middle of the brain, like directly behind your eyes in the middle between your eyes and your nose deep down. You allow a flow of of energy between the temporal lobe, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex, and the dorsolateral pre- All these fancy areas of your brain, okay? We get We get all this energy, but it flows and you get gamma waves flowing from the front to the back of the way brain. So we see this beautiful And you're saying this is all happening from writing? It's from all of these steps building up. And but writing allows a free flow of energy. Do you want people to do those three steps like literally time sequentially? So I I sit down, I prep myself, I'm meditating, I'm developing the awareness, I'm reflecting on it, now I'm journaling, and so this is maybe over 20 or 30 minutes. Okay, so then what's step four? Step four then is recheck. So now you're pretending you've got all this stuff down and it's normally a huge mess and that's better. That's great. Whatever. Just pour it out. That releases all this energy. You start pulling up stuff you don't even know is there. Then recheck is to look at what you've written and try and reconceptualize it. See it differently. Redesign it. What have I said? What am I saying? It's like a when they do an autopsy on someone who to try and find out what's what the cause of death was. That's what you doing. You're doing an autopsy. You actually dis- What I'm talking about is brain surgery without the blood. You literally are doing brain surgery. You're pulling a thought up to awareness. You are dissecting it and starting the autopsy process through reflection. You putting that down on paper in your written point so that you can now look at what you've what you've identified and now you are looking in the recheck, you're trying to make sense of that. What are the patterns? And each day is a tiny step forward. So you're not going to solve the identity crisis in one day. That's what I keep talking about the 63 days. And sometimes you might do multiple, cuz as you come up with one, you find, oh, there's all these things, but you will get to a level. And then, uh, the recheck leads you to, um, an a reconceptualizing, a redesigning of, okay, I saw myself like this. I've been seeing myself like this. It seems like this could be one of the causes. Now, what could I do today? This is very important. What can I do now? We We tend to do this big thing. I can fix this all in in one day. You're not going to get there like that. You have to take a tiny, tiny little bit. You have to focus on what you can do today. So, step five is an act of reach. From my recheck, trying to make sense of this. And I'm not going to make sense of the whole thing today, but something there will make a little bit of sense. Now, I'm going to do something very simple, a little act of reach, which could be as simple as, okay, well, when I feel that I'm useless, I'm actually going to tell myself I'm not useless. It could be a song that you sing in your head. It could be a state it a reach? Because you're reaching towards a goal. Okay. So, I'm actively taking a step towards my goal. Yes, I'm doing something physical. Here's the really cool thing. Is what we found from the research is that when you take a little thing, a statement as simple as, um, if if I feel like I can't do it, I can do it. It's a simple statement, uh, if I, um, if I see myself as being a not a learner, I see myself as being a learner. It's as simple as that. State, even if you don't believe it consciously, you have gone through a process of you're now rewiring. You're building a new pattern in your brain. So, you've got this toxic tree. Okay, so this I drag around the world. It's from South Africa. It's a little wiry tree. But thoughts look like this. Okay, so this is now a toxic tree. So, I'm going to bring this into awareness, step one. Okay, and then you're going to reflect on this. What are these little branches? What What Why? The why? Why am I thinking Ask, answer, discuss. Then I'm going going writing down what I discover. Then I'm going to look, recheck, I'm going to look at what I've discovered, and then I'm going to develop some kind of little action. That little action I in my app that that I've developed to to teach the system, you can put in like the reminders on your iPhone. You can type it in to set it to go off and remind you seven times a day. Why seven? It seems like if we have intervals of seven during the course of the day, where a little prompt comes up on your computer screen and reminds you, you know, like you got to go and do some shopping and you remind you, keep in mind until you just press complete on your iPhone. That's what I'm talking about. By taking the little simple statement and putting it into your iPhone, and it just pops up on your screen, or you can write it on a journal, you can do whatever. I just like to use technology in that way. I I don't have to do anything. It takes me a second to read it, but it reminds me. So, in other words, I'm blending my con- conscious and my non-conscious mind. So, the work I'm doing in my non-conscious mind is being reminded during the course of the day. Every reminder is a little drop of water to water the plant to give it more energy. The more energy I give the healthy This is a healthy one. Okay, this is a nice healthy one. The more energy I give this, the less energy this has. So, I'm not ignoring this. I'm not doing what traditional methods will say, "You must just suppress this." You can't. This never goes away. I have to actually redesign this. You have to redesign your identity. You still talk about your previous identity, but you don't talk about it from this angle. You talk about it from this angle. You used to think like that. And there will be days where a little bit of this pops back in, but then you can wire it out and catch it quickly and get it out again. But the whole point here is that a lot of traditional cognitive behavior therapy identifies a thought and then teaches you techniques to talk it away, to try and convince yourself. That's really hard work and it's not sustainable. Mindfulness and I mean, meditation and things will get you in the right state, but this is these five steps are beyond mindfulness. What I've shown from my research is that you can have a boomerang effect. If you just become aware and you don't do something, you can go back into that state and get worse. Classic case example is in my most recent research we had a control group and an experimental group. The control group were not given the technique, which was these five steps in an app form. So, they didn't get the individual therapy. It was all done because I'm very firm believer that you as a person are brilliant. You have this resilience in you and you have the ability to give yourself a lot of coaching. So, what we did was in this in this research study, which was double blind, random controlled, all the gold standard, done with as a single subject design, which means I looked at the individual, measured them against themselves, and then we did do a group we did compare the experimental to the control group. So, we did a lot of different testing simplified. We did three areas of testing and one was psychological. I have a scale I've developed that looks at the nonconscious mind, how are you thinking, etc., your awareness, and self-regulation, that kind of stuff. We used traditional scales that they use in hospitals and whatever. And we used the narrative, very important. What's your story? That's the most important thing. What is your story? What's going on in your life? What are your circumstances? Most important part of the psychological. Then we looked at blood and telomeres and cortisol and all the traditional thing. Telomeres are caps on on the chromosomes, X chromosomes, on your DNA, and those little caps are very significant when it comes to cellular health. And when people are under toxic stress, they shorten. And when you uh manage your stress, they lengthen. I showed that in 9 weeks you can lengthen the telomeres, and it's actually almost unheard of except Dr. Epel, who's the um leading scientist, Nobel winner in this area, has started showing that you can make these changes within 9 weeks. So, we confirmed that with the study that when you manage your mind, you can change your cellular health, your biological age, in other words. Um and so, you control that. So, you literally with your mind control how your DNA functions. You control, for example, we all know about cortisol. Cortisol drives so many things. We saw a significant relationship as people managed their mind using their five steps um um in terms of cortisol dropping to the to cuz everyone's cortisol is also measured against themselves not against the standard. There's a basic standard but with this such a variability within that. Homocysteine is another one. So in other words, without confusing everyone we looked at blood, we looked at DNA, we looked at psychological and we looked in the brain using QEEG which is very accurate looking at the energy and how the brain's responding. So in the control in the experimental group and the control group they all got this testing. So everyone was made very aware of the all knew it was a mental health study but the difference was the experimental group got the technique. So what we saw was major difference with day one to day 21 in the experimental group there was a significant reduction in anxiety by 81%. That doesn't mean anxiety will go away, it means that you manage it. Anxiety will always be with us. We need to understand anxiety is a normal human response. So is depression, so is OCD, so is intro so intro intrusive thoughts, they're all signals telling us, "Hey, cool down, focus, take a moment, something's going on in your life." So what we what I teach people is that this is always going to be with us but we've got to know where it gets unhealthy and how to manage that. And there'll be periods in your life where it does get unhealthy. That's okay, you can manage it and that's what we saw happening, a reduction in depression, reduction in anxiety up to 81% significant changes in cortisol levels, significant changes in telomere length. We had some millennials we had quite a lot of millennials on the study that had biological ages that were 20 years older than their chronological age and by the end of the study they were back at their normal age, biological age. I mean this is nine weeks. The subjects that did the process every day and they would spend seven to get through those five steps for a trauma thing, you can do this sequentially as as you asked earlier on in as short as seven minutes. And so it's a minute and a half per each step. So, it's not long. But then, over 63 days, that's when you see the change. But we saw changes in as early as 7 days. That doesn't mean you stop. And this is always the danger I found with my patients. Because you see change so quickly, you think, "Oh, I've got this under control." But you'll lose that. 7 days is not enough to cause the to allow the neuroplasticity to take place. So, changes occur, but all the proteins are unstable. They have to get to a stable state. In fact, what we see in the brain is the little branches, where your memories are stored in the trees. When people are at day 7, for example, it's just a tiny bump on the outside. There's like a little bump that joins it. By day 21, it's changed into a mushroom shape. This is work done by Dr. Marian Diamond, who died at 94 last year. One of the leading researchers when it comes to this with that memory stored in dendrites, not in synapses. And she showed with her work that a change is over time. And when you've got a bump shape, it's not a strong enough memory. That's 7 days. At 14 days, it becomes a lollipop shape, the little connector where the the leaf connects to the branch. And then, by day 21, it's a mushroom. And it's only when it's mushrooms that we can start automatizing, building the habit, making something useful inside of us. How many times do people say, "I'm going to do this wellness course. I'm going to read this book. I'm going to do that thing." You teach people about goals all the time. Whatever wellness change, whatever food change, diet change, exercise change, business goal, but to make your brain learn that, to put it into the conscious, subconscious, non-conscious, to a point where you can actually utilize it, it's going to take you you have to go through the proper brain system. And that's pretty much what I've researched. That's my management, in a nutshell. Nice. Well, that was incredible. Thank you so much for walking us through that. That that is a a lot of life lessons, research, everything put into a nice simple formula. So, thank you so much. Guys, if you haven't She's She's a whole world of stuff. She's written several books um on topics about memory and mind management and getting this all together. So, take a look if there's anything that you're struggling with and you can put that five-step process to the use, do it for sure. Getting your mind under control is a shared obsession that you and I have. You guys will all benefit greatly from it. Dr. Leaf, thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it. And guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.